A man holds a photograph of Peter Willcox during a protest for his release after being seized by the Russian coast guard on Sept. 18, 2013. / Michael Nagle, Greenpeace

by Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY

by Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY

FROM SHORE TO SHIP SOMEWHERE NORTHEAST OF THE BAHAMAS - American Peter Willcox has been Greenpeace's skipper of choice for some time now.

He has been the target of French agents, spent time in jail cells from Peru to Russia, and once helped take over a power plant in Turkey.

"I come from a politically active family so I have always appreciated an activist's lifestyle," Willcox says via phone from the Atlantic Ocean.

"To be working for something outside your own self-interest, that's the idea. It gives you a broader view of the world and a better way of fitting into the planet you live on," he says.

Willcox spoke as he piloted the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior from Mexico to Amsterdam, where Greenpeace is headquartered. Though 61 years old, he sounds like a man still in love with the confrontational business of taking on Japanese whaling ships and disrupting nuclear tests, although Greenpeace focuses its actions these days on climate-related issues.

"It's really easy to feel impotent and crushed and to think, well, 'How can I make a difference.' Being part of Greenpeace makes me feel that I can do something," Willcox says.

He says that he has lost track of the number of direct actions - Greenpeace's term for non-violent civil disobedience - that he been involved with over the years. He says the actions on the whole have not been successful but that that is not really the point.

"To my mind, actions are public education tools. It's our way of getting something in the public sphere, and getting it discussed and debated," he says. "That's my first and biggest job."

Willcox's day-to-day responsibility is to lead a crew of 17 people, including mates, engineers, an electrician, a radio operator, deck hands and a cook.

Willcox was Greenpeace's chief sailor in 1985 when French government agents acting on the orders of President Francois Mitterrand bombed the Rainbow Warrior while docked in New Zealand to stop it from disrupting a nuclear test in the Pacific Ocean.

Willcox's friend, Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira, went aboard the ship to get his cameras after the bomb struck and drowned when a second bomb detonated.

In September last year, Willcox was the captain of the Arctic Sunrise when it was seized by the Russian coast guard as a group of 28 activists and two journalists sought to climb an oil rig in the Barents Sea owned by gas giant Gazprom.

Willcox spent two months in a Russian prison charged with piracy. He was released on bail.

Willcox says that the activists he sees on board haven't really changed in his time running Greenpeace boats.

"You get a group of people, all like-minded, working together on a shared goal. That part hasn't changed," he says.

In other ways it has.

"When I started out, there was one campaigner on the boat, and half the time his job was to bring the recreational pharmaceuticals," he told the magazine Men's Journal recently, adding that campaign operations are now quite professionalized.

Still, before his imprisonment in Murmansk in Russia, Willcox had never spent more than a single night in jail.

"It upset my kids. It upset my wife more," he says. "In the Russian legal system most people who are put in detention are found guilty."

Willcox has a daughter in college in the United States, another daughter living in Paris, and his wife lives on an island off the coast of Maine. Having friends and family scattered all about is typical for an activist, he says.

"It's been hard on my family because I have been gone so much," he says. "Although I am a sailor so that is part of my deal."